A supposed "pregnancy pact" that drew worldwide attention to eight teenage girls at a Massachusetts high school may be fiction, the city's school board chairman says. He says none of the girls has confirmed any pact on the record.
"My gut feeling is that there may have been some sort of pact after the fact -- you know, two girls who are pregnant say they'll stick together," Greg Verga, chairman of the Gloucester, Mass., school committee, said Sunday.
Reporters took notice of the fishing community northeast of Boston last week after reports that 18 girls at Gloucester High School -- more than four times last year's total -- learned they were pregnant this spring, and school principal Joseph Sullivan told Time magazine that eight of those girls had agreed "to get pregnant and raise their babies together."
Sullivan could not be reached for comment Sunday.
Verga said the story of the pact uncoiled like a game of telephone in the month or so since a local newspaper reported on the spike in pregnancies and the resignation of the pediatrician, Brian Orr, and the nurse, Kim Daly, who ran the school's health clinic.
They quit last month after a dispute with the hospital that funds the clinic. The pair had proposed offering contraceptives to students confidentially, a plan that Cindy Donaldson, the hospital's executive director, opposed, the Gloucester Daily Times reported.
Neither Orr nor Donaldson could be reached for comment Sunday.
Ray Lamont, editor of the Gloucester Daily Times, says his reporters, who have covered the pregnancy spike since March, did not find any pact.
Time reporter Kathleen Kingsbury, who originally wrote that the girls believed to be in the pact "declined to be interviewed," later told National Public Radio she had spoken to many of the girls and their friends, but all were unwilling to be identified.
She told NPR the girls "really didn't have a strong life plan and decided, essentially, to make their own plan and take control of the situation. They decided ... to be a mother would be their identity."
Experts say the Gloucester pregnancies and an increase in the rate of teen pregnancies nationwide show that many teens still don't understand, or don't want to understand, the burdens of pregnancy.
"This is not a story about sex education," says Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "This is a story about a failure to take childbirth seriously. These girls could have had condoms distributed in their living rooms, and they still would have gotten pregnant."
Nancy Redd, author of the 2007 self-help book Body Drama,
blames the entertainment media's "obsession" with pregnant celebrities coupled with incomplete information from adults about the realities of pregnancy. "Teenagers are really smart. They're not getting pregnant because they're dumb, they're getting pregnant because they're misinformed. Everything they have just tells them that pregnancy is fascinating."
Says Lamont: "'Pact' or not, these kids thought it would be cool to be moms together. Where did they get that idea?"
Contributing: Angela Haupt
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